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Tuesday, 30 December 2008

As I mentioned in another place, I got for Christmas a CD of music and songs from Terezin, or Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp they’d dolled up as a ghetto to fool the Red Cross. The CD features Anne Sofie von Otter, definitely one of the world’s great mezzos, as well as baritone Christian Gerhaher and violinist Daniel Hope.

So there I am listening to it when suddenly, on track 4, something makes me stop what I’m doing (ironing) and listen closely. It’s not so much the words, since I have only very rudimentary German and tend not to take anything in unless I’m listening consciously to the words. It’s the extremely simple music, and one word: Polentransport. I suppose I wasn’t expecting anything so overt. I thought the songs the inmates had written would all have to have been oblique, allegorical, indirect. I stop and pay attention, and listen to what I can of the words. Here they are:

Farewell, my friend This is the parting of the ways, For tomorrow I must go. I’m leaving you behind, They’re taking me away, I’m going on the Poland transport.

You often gave me strength, You were loyal and good, Always ready to help. The press of your hand Took cares away We suffered it all together.

Farewell, my friend, It’s too bad for you, But parting will be hard for me. Don’t lose hope, You meant so much to me, Now we’ll never see each other again.

I don’t suppose it could be any more straightforward than that. It’s a song of parting, like Ae Fond Kiss, to which I return again and again, but this time there’s one word which signals that the circumstances are different: Polentransport. That single word tells the whole story.

And here’s the story:

The song was written by Ilse Weber (née Herlinger), born in Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic. As a Jew she was taken, after the Nazis invaded, to Terzin with her husband Willi and her son Tommy, from their home in Prague. An older son, Hanus, had been sent to Sweden via a kindertransport, and escaped the war altogether.

Weber had been a children’s author in Prague before the war, as well as a musician, and the two things come together in the naked simplicity of her words and music in this song and in others she wrote while in Terzin, one of which, Wiegala, was a lullaby.

In 1944 her husband was to be transported to Auschwitz (the Polentransport mentioned in the song) and Weber volunteered herself and Tommy to accompany him, so as to keep the family together. Instead, on arrival at Auschwitz, Tommy and Ilse were immediately separated from Willi, and gassed. Willi lived on for 30 years. Hanus, meanwhile, lived in Stockholm as a journalist, not far from the place where Anne Sofie von Otter grew up, the daughter of a Swedish nobleman and diplomat.

Her story is so incredible I’ll leave it to Norman Lebrecht to tell it here. In short, her father heard the confession on a train of a Nazi officer, and when he passed the information on to his government, they did nothing. A better result might have let the world know a lot earlier about places like Auschwitz, and perhaps Isle and Tommy might not have died.

Since it makes little sense to talk about a song nobody has heard or can hear in full, I’m taking the unusual step of putting an MP3 online for a couple of days only, to allow diligent readers to get the full experience. Check it out here.

From time to time, while faffing about in YouTube usually, I find myself taking an interest in the various cover versions of well-known songs, starting long ago with all the versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which has now been crowned by none other than Simon Cowell, who made all the finalists in the latest season of the British X-Factor record the song.

You’re taking your life in your hands exploring the many versions that exist of Gloomy Sunday, the song originally known as Szomorú vasárnap, and now widely known as the Hungarian Suicide Song.

Legend has it that the song is closely associated with suicide, and some extremists will even go so far as to promise you too will commit suicide shortly after listening. Well, I’m still here, so maybe there’s not much to that theory.

The composer of the song, Rezső Seress, did in fact kill himself, but he took 35 years to get round to it (the song was set to music in 1933, and he died in 1968) so it’s a little hard to show causation there. Billy McKenzie, meanwhile, the lead singer of Scottish band The Associates, also committed suicide (in 1997) after (15 years after) recording a cover version of the song. As far as the rest of the claims are concerned, we’re dealing with the vaguest of allegations – something the Internet loves more than anything else.

But more of that later. Let’s go back to the start.

Seress, real name Spitzer, was a pianist and composer. If you want more than that on him, you’re going to have to learn Hungarian, because the Magyar page of Wikipedia has a great deal more information than any other. The only other English sources on Google refer to the song, which was written in 1933 at the request of the poet László Jávor, who’s so famous not even Magyar Wikipedia has a page on him.

Gloomy Sunday with a hundred white flowers I was waiting for you my dearest with a prayer A Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams The carriage of my sorrow returned to me without you It is since then that my Sundays have been forever sad Tears my only drink, the sorrow my bread...

Gloomy Sunday

This last Sunday, my darling please come to me There'll be a priest, a coffin, a catafalque and a winding-sheet There'll be flowers for you, flowers and a coffin Under the blossoming trees it will be my last journey My eyes will be open, so that I could see you for a last time Don't be afraid of my eyes, I'm blessing you even in my death...

The song first came to prominence in the English-speaking world in 1936, when a translation by Desmond Carter was recorded by Paul Robeson. It looked like this:

Sadly one Sunday I waited and waited With flowers in my arms for the dream I'd created I waited 'til dreams, like my heart, were all broken The flowers were all dead and the words were unspoken The grief that I knew was beyond all consoling The beat of my heart was a bell that was tolling

Saddest of Sundays

Then came a Sunday when you came to find me They bore me to church and I left you behind me My eyes could not see one I wanted to love me The earth and the flowers are forever above me The bell tolled for me and the wind whispered, "Never!" But you I have loved and I bless you forever

Last of all Sundays

The Carter version takes a few liberties with the original, mainly in the fact that the narrator doesn’t himself die. This version is now only performed, as far as I can make out, by Diamanda Galas.

Then came a new version (we can probably assume that Tin Pan Alley was full of Hungarian emigrés by this time, who would have been familiar with the original) by Sam Lewis. Here’s what Lewis made of the song:

Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless Little white flowers will never awaken you Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you Angels have no thought of ever returning you Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?

Gloomy Sunday

Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all My heart and I have decided to end it all Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad I know Let them not weep let them know that I'm glad to go Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you

Gloomy Sunday

Dreaming, I was only dreaming I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, here Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you My heart is telling you how much I wanted you

Gloomy Sunday

Lewis, as you can see, has not only retained the idea of the narrator’s own death from the original, he has in fact made it a suicide, which is not openly stated in the original. That line, Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?, was responsible for the song, as sung by Billie Holliday, being banned by the BBC, and is surely behind the legend that has built up around the song ever since.

However, Lewis was also responsible for the atrocity that is the third verse, in which the whole death thing is revealed as a dream, with the beloved restored safe and sound by the lover’s side, and the whole gloomy message no more than a sort of Thanatised expression of longing.

Ghastly as that misrepresentation may be, it’s the version that’s been carried down to today by the likes of Elvis Costello, The Associates, Marianne Faithfull, Sinéad O’Connor, Sarah McLachlan, Bjork, Portishead and Sarah Brightman. The Lewis lyrics, but without the damnable third verse, were also recorded by Lydia Lunch and Gitane Demone. Links in this paragraph lead to YouTube videos of the performers concerned.

The myth of the link to suicides, meanwhile, is dealt with by Snopes here. In all likelihood the song was somehow linked to several suicides (suicides are melodramatic events, let’s face it, and I’m sure less apt lyrics have been quoted by the departed in notes etc) and the legend was carried on in the West, influenced by Hungary’s apparent reputation for a high suicide rate.

I wasn’t aware of that reputation, and so I checked some recent figures, and sure enough Hungary comes fifth in a WHO list, with 26 suicides per 100,000 population in 2005, behind Lithuania, Belarus, Russia and Slovenia. Put another way, that’s about seven suicides a day. That compares to 6.8 in the UK, and 11 in the US. It also compares to 21.1 in Belgium, which translates to seven suicides a day. For a theory as to why Hungary might be more suicidal than other nations, see this article taken from the now-defunct Hungary Report Monthly Digest. Excerpt:

Gloom, depression and suicide seem to be part and parcel of Hungarian culture. "You can hardly meet with a Hungarian who wouldn't have relatives or friends who really committed suicide - it's a kind of national disease, it's a kind of sickness," says Peter Muller, a Hungarian playwright who has written a play about Gloomy Sunday and has studied the suicide phenomenon.

[…]

But the Gloomy Sunday playwright Peter Muller thinks that there is more to the Hungarian gloom that just frustrated aspirations. The real reasons go much deeper, he says. It is essentially a problem of identity. "Somehow the root is missing. We live in a very strange position of the world. We always try to stick to the Western culture, we try to escape from the Eastern mentality and somehow we are in a limbo, we don't belong to anybody, it's a kind of loneliness. We have somehow lost our Oriental roots without finding another one - and if you are in trouble, if your life is difficult it is the root that can save you."

I’ll leave that for any Hungarian readers (I know we have at least one) to comment on.

Monday, 29 December 2008

I’m informed today by Jure Cuhalev, owner of Zemanta, that this blog has been added to the blogging pool used by Zemanta. Don’t ask me what they saw in it, but from now on users of Zemanta will be offered links to this blog if their posts have any connection with mine. So I’d better get back to making some, hadn’t I?

Zemanta, for those who don’t know of it, is a useful blogging add-on you can use in Firefox or in Windows Live Writer, which I use almost exclusively now, and provides photos, links and related stories depending on what you’re writing about. You can also create a blog-pool of your own to draw from by including the blogs of friends.

I already carry a Zemanta logo whenever I use them for anything, so I won’t need to be plugging them constantly. Thanks to Jure for the honour, which I think it is.

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

Isn’t it cute that the second most popular how-to question of 2008 was “how to kiss”? There’s obviously hope for the world if people are still willing to learn, if not so much if they need to ask in the first place.